Toledo Art Museum Finally Surrenders Pot

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There are several versions of the story that this week Toledo Art Museum has - rather gracelessly - given a smuggled pot back to Italy. The pot was bought from Gianfranco and Ursula Becchina for $90,000 by the late museum curator Kurt Luckner in 1982 but it had been smuggled from Italy to Switzerland and it turns out that it figures in the Medici archive. Efforts to get the Museum to acknowledge the implications of that go back to the 1990s.

Tahree Lane, 'Toledo art museum to give back rare jug', Toledo Blade 20th June 2012 has a fairly detailed account. The pot came with a forged collecting history:

[the] documentation was stunningly scant: a photocopy of two paragraphs typed in German on hotel stationery by the Swiss hotel's owner, stating he had owned it since 1935. A 1939 Italian law said all archeological finds after 1939 are property of Italy. [...] Decades later, Mrs. Becchina would admit that she and her husband forged documents and that he bought antiquities from Italian diggers and others.

Brian Kennedy, museum director seems less than pleased, he is quoted as moaning: "A museum must prove its innocence, he said, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs only to provide "probable cause" before seizing an object". Indeed, museums must prove their innocence not just before US authorities, but the viewing public. Are they not just storehouses of looted trophies? Let us remember the attitudes that surround their acquisition, the Art Museum boasts that the purchase of this pot "was a coup for Toledo because the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had also wanted it". Disgustingly:

Mr. Kennedy [...] noted such cases raise questions: Should people be able to see Italian antiquities only in Italy? Should a one-of-a kind object in Toledo be returned to a country that has numerous similar objects? Should there be an end-date to repatriations? And should Immigration and Customs Enforcement be permitted to seize items from American museums for probable cause?  

I would say the answer to the museum curator's rhetorical questions is stop buying and harbouring stolen artefacts and stop moaning when you are caught out having done so.

He seems genuinely surprised that nobody was interested in coming to some kind of a "settlement" over the fact his museum had bought a smuggled pot of unclear origin and wanted to hang onto it even after that had been demonstrated. 

The Courthouse news Service (Brian Grosh, 'Uncle Sam Seizes Etruscan Vase From Museum' / retitled: 'Italy to Welcome Home Stolen Etruscan Vase', CNS Friday, June 22, 2012) has a different slant on the whole affair citing a federal complaint against "One Etruscan Black-Figured Kalpis, Circa 510-500 B.C." and a press statement by U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach referring to the collaboration of the museum and its willingness to see the object goes back to those from whom it was stolen. Grosh notes the attitude of the Museum:

The "collaboration" and "willingness" Dettelbach mentioned were not echoed by the museum's director, Brian Kennedy, who told the Toledo Blade that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ignored requests for additional proof and repeatedly threatened to seize the artifact if it wasn't simply handed over. According to the Blade, Kennedy likened encounter to a drug bust. 

It is interesting to note the wording of the DoJ press release, a point not often made about the passage of objects through the international art trade, Brian M. Moskowitz, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Michigan and Ohio states that the outcome of this case:

establishes the true provenance of the kalpis and reconnects this valuable artifact to its rightful cultural origin and history.

David Gill notes the wider implications of the affair: 'Toledo to return Etruscan hydria' and 'Toledo and implications for other collections'. The antiquities trade lobbobloggers do not mention this case.